Kotakode Launched as Community Channel and Frequently Asked Questions About Programming

Departing from his observations, he inspired Peter Tanugraha to establish a useful platform for students programmer in Indonesia. With his partner Michael Englo, code box officially launched in mid 2020.

"When I was working in Canada, I often participated in Stack Overflow. One day when I was Browsing, I came across a question by an Indonesian. Because Stack Overflow is a platform that strict to use English, questions are difficult for him to understand, maybe because of his less proficient English skills," said Peter.

While doing research, Peter found that most of those who have difficulty understanding are then directed to several platforms such as Facebook Group, Telegram Chat, Discord Chat, to Whatsapp Chat which has become another alternative for question/answer media about coding. It was found that the total number of users from all these groups could reach more than 4 million people. Seeing this fact, Peter was provoked to launch a comprehensive platform for programmers in Indonesian.

"That's where the inspiration came from to build an online platform Kotakode, where we want to create an inclusive community for programmer throughout Indonesia. I think with Indonesia it is predicted to be leader in digital economy in 2025, the number programmer throughout Indonesia will also increase," said Peter.

In Indonesia, there is no platform that specifically becomes a channel for questions and answers and discussion of the participants programmer. Existing platforms from startups generally offer activities bootcamp coding and classes like Hacktiv8, Codedand Progate.

Kotakode business model

Currently, Kotakode has more than 2 thousand registered users. Per day Kotakode can get around 500 - 3000 pageviews. This November and December, the new Kotakode is launching community partnerships with a number of universities and vocational schools in Indonesia; the program will be run at the beginning of the semester (January 2021). This strategic move is projected to bring thousands of new users.

"Basically we have two types of partners, the first is Community Partners and the second is Supporting Partners. Community partnerships is a form of closer cooperation than support partner where students/participants from the second party will be directed to Kotakode if there are any questions regarding programming. While Supporting Partner is more about event collaboration, social media sound and also soft selling Kotakode," said Peter.

When asked what kind of business model and monetization strategy is being implemented, Peter emphasized that Kotakode has several monetization strategies that will be implemented in the future. Among them are Targeted Advertisement, Job Hiring Platform, and Kotakode Pro Version. Each of them will later apply payment per ad post, revenue per impressions, payment per job post, subscription per month and subscriptions per month.

"But for now we are still doing business bootstrapped, because Kotakode's current focus is to get a large number of users first," said Peter.

Pandemic and Kotakode plans

During the pandemic, Kotakode did not experience any significant problems. By prioritizing online, all processes can still run according to the activities of their users, namely the programmer. This is an advantage for Kotakode as a platform. One of the products that later became the user's choice was a question/answer forum and also a forum blogging.

"One of the reasons why people contribute to Kotakode (answer questions/write blogs) is to add to their portfolio. Due to this pandemic people are mostly staying at home, they have free time to try to add to their portfolio so that they can be more competitive di job market, said Peter.

Next year there are several plans that Kotakode wants to launch, including entering to the revenue-generating stage pass targeted Advertising on the platform. Kotakode also wants to create features job hiring on the platform.

"For now we are in a phase research where we have interviewed more than 20 technical recruiters and want to know more about tech-hiring landscape so that Kotakode can help. After we do revenue generating, activity plan fundraising for team expansion from the side engineering, product, marketing and business development will also do," said Peter.